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TVmisGuided writes "People have made UAVs out of wood, aluminum, even 3D-printed plastic. But now comes the tale of C#/C++ developer Ed Scott who, after damaging his Gaui 330x, got the idea of designing and building a Lego quadcopter. And it worked! 'Most people go to their favorite hobby store to get parts for their UAV, I go to my kid's playroom.'"

Last millenium weq had RC planes and shit. Why call them drones now? Is that to give legitimacy to extrajudicial killings, or is it to derive coolness from them? It's one thing or the other, that's for fucking sure, so tell me. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle is such a needy and funny thing to call it... you mean like a paper airplane? Or a helium balloon? WTF people. Oh, and this is bad enough without dragging your kid into it, btw. Just a thought. Now do your butthurt thingy where you mod me down as flamebait or troll, you know you wanna ^^

I thought the difference between drone and RC planes was the ability to fly them out of line of site - drones have cameras and give the pilot some form of first-person view as they are flying. At least that's how I've always thought of the difference...

This thing has first person view using a headset from the ground. There's a holy fuckload of negativity around here. I think the project is pretty awesome, and I didn't expect any more than the frame to be made of lego after reading the summary..

Hi everyone, I am the dad in the video, I want to clear a couple things. !) It’s just an RC plane (Jonathan) Yes, in the beginning it 100% WAS but its not now, well more of a UAV than simple RC because of the FPV. Then about mid way we added the Arducoptor controller. Uploaded waypoints and it flew 100% on its own using a Mediatech GPS through 3 waypoints and back home so yes it’s a true drone now. It also can land on its own but right now it’s such a hard landing it broke the legs that

Not that the color really mattered to a kid. With regular bricks, you could make a delta wing fighter plane from the jumbo-jet wing sections. A missile defence system could be built from those 4x4 rotating turntables and a hinge joint. Use a couple of 8x1's or 8x2's for the missile and the sloping 2x1's for the missile wings.

As far as building tanks with Lego Technical kits, you could get the Technical Lego 856 Bulldozer [blogspot.no]. Strip the model down to a couple of long

The website is a UAV/UAS enthusiasts website, so of course they're going to use the terminology of UAVs. As for the drone part, it was only in the headline so an editor or sub-editor chose it. You know, an editor from a group of DRONE ENTHUSIASTS. So I think that you've answered your own question, it's to derive coolness from them. These are people with a hobby that may seem esoteric and uninteresting to many but they like to think that what they do is cool, just like any other sort of geek. Same as a table

Is that to give legitimacy to extrajudicial killings, or is it to derive coolness from them?

Nothing new there. The military has always played with language to dehumanize the enemy and sanitize the process of killing other people. Think of all the words you never heard before Iraq/Afghanistan: "Insurgent", "IED", etc. What happened to "rebel" and "bomb"?

How is it trolling if I genuinely believe that calling this stuff "drones" is sucking murderer dick AT BEST, and that calling them unnmanned aerial vehicles is idiotic in any case?

You haven't even got the faintest clue what would constitute trolling, you just know it's an easy defense. Instead of dealing with what I said, make up a motivation for me saying it that allows you to weasel out.

The same goes for "flamebait": I don't pretend to despise you guys just to evoke a reaction, I truly think you're shit,

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without a human pilot on board. Its flight is either controlled autonomously by computers in the vehicle, or under the remote control of a pilot on the ground or in another vehicle. [..] Historically,

What? You make a claim, I ask you to back it up, you say "no, pay me"? You got it upside down buddy. If you want me to take what you said seriously in the slightest, cough up an argument. Or just shut up in the first place, but don't bitch at me for doing the work for you and seeing it to an end you don't like. The fucking nerve, the comedy and idiocy of it.

Nope, you asked a question, I told you what I have observed for usage and suddenly you want a scholorly work on the subject. Sorry, no. This is NOT a debate, it was a discussion that you seem to be taking Waaaaayyyy too seriously.

So no, I really don't give a shit if you want to take me seriously or not.

Hey Johann,
Sure, Ill try to do a flight tomorrow after work, it still has the same flight plan in it.
If not it won't bee until the weekend but it should be tomorrow after work assuming there are no games going on I should get it after work.
Take a look at the Arducoptor boards, they are pretty cool, thats the one they also have autopilots for cars helicoprots etc.
Here is one of our other drones, this one is capable of fully automated RTH, or return to home, but not waypoints
http://www.youtube.com/wa [youtube.com]

If you notice in the shorter version on the video that only shows the Ardupilot flight the lego is flying autonomously
When I pan back the choper is a dot, there is no way a human can fly that unless using FPV, we were not using FPV although it is equipped with one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HbKz9hl6CQ [youtube.com]

Here is another example of it running the waypoints without the controller.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx-Qz7eXAyk [youtube.com]
Maybe you should take 5 min and look at the DIY Drones http://diydrones.com/ [diydrones.com] and see how many people are making Drones that actually fly themselves, not just simple RC controlled planes, these things fly themselves, take off and land themselves based on preprogrammed waypoints. Call it a drone, autopilot flying machines or whatever. These also log full telemetry about the flight too that

I use drones, you can call them RC planes or model planes (as we do in Australia), I wont get upset.

To me the difference is a drone is autonomous whilst an RC plane requires continuous input from a remote pilot.

With our drone, we program it with a flight path and parameters and it does it's thing with little or no input from the user. We do manual take off and landings via remote but once it reaches the starting co-ords we flip it into automatic mode. The biggest usage we have for them is to take aeri

We also have a NAZA controller but it does not do waypoints, it does a RTH full autonomously and with accuracy within ac couple feet.
This LEGO one has automated flight, we automated it about half way through the video using the Ardupilot and GPS and it does do waypoints
It did 3 waypoints on its own, if you see the last part of the video it was way to far for me to fly maybe a landing but thats it. In the USA the main rules are dont fly over places or around people and keep line of site. Granted I could

We kind of need to do waypoints as we use it for aerial photography and remote sensing, the more accurate the positioning when we take the photo the less work required to mosaic them later. One of the drones we use is the Yamaha RMAX helicopter that can carry 20 KG, the other is a custom built (basically a kit built) petrol powered plane using a MicroPilot 2028G that can carry just under 30 KG, 20 KG is enough to lift any of our sensing packages (mostly regular and IR cameras but we can get LIDAR units for

The true lego propellers I've seen would never be able to produce any thrust. The NXT + motors would be too heavy for it to fly, too.Don't get me wrong, it'd be massively cool, but just sounds unfeasible using all Lego.

Why is his doing something like this with his grandkids pretty lame? Seriously - he wasn't doing it for your approval and for you to be insulting to him (its not like he asked to be on slashdot) is a bit rude. What emotion inside you drove you to make that comment?

My granddad used to build stuff for me and repair bikes and such. Doing cool stuff with your grandkids while you still can. I guess some people don't have nice granddads and can only say "lame" all the time. Pretty lame.

The reason why we used the Lego Digital Designer (LDD) was used was to teach my kids how to use a CAD. Remember this is a Kiddie Cad and these are 7-11 year olds. I am actually an AutoCad registered developer and I wanted to teach my kids some things.
The LDD also lets us order the exact right amount of bricks and colors, it also creates an excel spread sheet. The kids learned a lot even what excel can do on a basic level/
People please look at this from a kids learning perspective not an adult, this p

Duurrrrrr, unlike those other people that made things out of other things, I made this thing out of Lego. See, completely different and newsworthy. It's not like I built a car out of steel then made a slightly different car out of carbon fiber. I took it another step. I used another thing for the thing instead. Get it? I used one thing in a place where you would not think the thing would be.

The goal of the project was to build a quadcopter with low-cost replaceable parts. If you have a one piece wood or carbonfibre chassis, and something breaks, that's the whole chassis needing replacing. If the quadcopter is made from modular parts, that's a bit better, but you would still need to purchase custom replacement parts if they break. Build the quadcopter chassis out of RV parts and regular bricks, you can buy a bucket of them for $50.

make millions selling it as a Harry Potter toy. Then use the Arducopter he already has setup to fly to their friends' houses. Hell, you could trade 128-bit friend codes so that it automatically allows friends to download their "home" GPS position, just leave it out at night so that it can deliver the messages.

... as far as I can see, the only thing Lego in this quadcopter is the plastic structure. Motors are not, batteries are not, control electronics are not, RF and presumably remote control are not, servomotors are not.

So are we discussing a "drone using some lego bricks for the structure"?

H.now mod me down, but remember I'm 50: at home I have older bricks than you (in addition to the vast amount aggregated by three sons)

I think this is a neat hack in the best sense of "hack", since they already had the bricks and the quadcopter parts. Plus, since it was designed by the kids, I will cut them some slack. Still, I would like to see the next, stronger, lighter and not glued version using Lego Technic beams. There is too much room for improvement:).

I have two sons and the Lego scars on the bottoms of my feet to prove it.

I don't have any kids, but I still have Legos. Now if only I had room to bring them out and do something with them. I would sell them if only I thought I could get any decent percentage of money back out of them, because I'd be glad if some kid(s) somewhere were getting enjoyment out of them. I've let a lot of stuff go cheap but my Lego is not on that list:)

... as far as I can see, the only thing Lego in this quadcopter is the plastic structure. Motors are not, batteries are not, control electronics are not, RF and presumably remote control are not, servomotors are not.

From the summary:

after damaging his Gaui 330x, got the idea of designing and building a Lego quadcopter. And it worked! 'Most people go to their favourite hobby store to get parts for their UAV, I go to my kids playroom.

What part about "after damaging" and "get parts" didn't you understand?

Also, please share your plans to build a battery using only legos; I think we'd all be interested.

Hi everyone, I am the dad in the video, I want to clear a couple things.
!) It’s just an RC plane (Jonathan)
Yes, in the beginning it 100% WAS but its not now, well more of a UAV than simple RC because of the FPV. Then about mid way we added the Arducoptor controller. Uploaded waypoints and it flew 100% on its own using a Mediatech GPS through 3 waypoints and back home so yes it’s a true drone now. It also can land on its own but right now it’s such a hard landing it broke the legs th

If the Lego quad interests you, you might want to check out V929, V939, V949, or V959. These toy grade quadcopters are dirt cheap. You can get one online for less than 50 bucks and they fly really well.